Cooling It! No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming

Sometimes harsh criticism
is an act of true friendship; this book is dedicated to all the new friends it
will make me.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rob Knapp, who
spent enormous amounts of time to make extensive and useful suggestions. Thanks
to beta readers Peter Dorman, Peter Bohmer, Michael Albert and my mother Ruth
Lipow. Thanks to Robin Hahnel and Frederick Peters whose critiques of my
original article on which this was based inspired me to expand into a book.
Thanks to all the Buffistas whose amazing collective knowledge contributed
enormously. Thanks to Tom Gray and everyone on the AWEA’s renewable energy list
for their help. Thanks to Brian Tokar for his willingness to provide answers on
sustainable agriculture. While the credit for anything I got right goes to
these and hundreds of other sources, blame for anything wrong is mine alone.

Special thanks to Barry
Commoner for writing “The Poverty of Power” – the seed of most work on
eco-efficiency.

"If Heaven" lyric
used with permission from songwriter Gretchen Peters, and copyright holder
Sony/ATV Music Publishing. This is NOT licensed under a Creative Commons
license, but is under standard copyright protection, meaning separate
permissions are required for each use. In other words, don't use the quote in
derivative works; it may only be included in substantially unaltered copies.

This is an optimistic book
about a gloomy subject - the need to reduce fossil fuel use to fight global
warming. It argues that we have technological substitutes available for oil,
gas and coal now - at market prices comparable to those we currently
pay. Neither cost nor technical barriers prevent drastic and speedy reductions
in greenhouse emissions; slowing global warming is no longer a technical
problem (if it ever was). It is structural, institutional, social, and
political.

Why cover this particular
topic? The carbon lobby[1]
has mostly (not entirely) given up disputing that global warming is occurring.
They know that they won't be able to confuse the public on its human-caused
nature much longer. ( ~75% of the U.S. public understands global warming is a
real problem[2].
If you are one of the remaining ~25%, please read the appendix Hot Lies and
Cold Facts. ) But a final stalling tactic is open to deniers - to pretend
that nothing can be done, or at least nothing that most people are willing to
live with. There is an old engineering saying: "no solution, no
problem".

Converging with this, there
is a small, but unfortunately influential primitivist movement. In their belief
that technology itself is totalitarian, they also contribute to the idea that
the only solution to global warming is a drastic reduction in the technical
level of civilization - perhaps down to the hunter-gatherer level. Many
well-meaning, intelligent people promote a less extreme version of this trope -
the conviction that we need to impoverish working people in rich nations to
solve our environmental crisis, and deal justly with the poorer countries.

The primary purpose of this
book is to ensure that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies
become known as inexpensive fossil fuel substitutes available today, rather
than a high priced vision of tomorrow. The U.S. needs to understand that
continued use of fossil fuel is a political decision, rather than a technical
one. It argues against the belief that the only choices are destructive,
expensive, continued burning of fossil fuels, or dramatic cuts in the standard
of living. It tries to accomplish this by gathering in one place information
that has been widely scattered; it also tries to organize the information and
clearly separate what we can do cheaply now, what we can do expensively now,
and what we may be able to do in the future.

The argument that more and
more global warming deniers will rely on is that it is too expensive to phase
out most fossil fuel use.

There
is a certain absurdity to spending the bulk of a book refuting the idea that
saving the world is too expensive. But this absurd task is also a necessary one.
If the methods offered to stop global warming are too costly or too unpleasant,
many people will prefer to wait and hope that technology provides some magical
painless solution.

Other popularizers have
written about efficiency and renewables. This book differs in not assuming major
technical breakthroughs, or drastic price drops in prices of existing
technology; while these are both likely and desirable, we have cost-effective
solutions available now.

Also what if the
breakthroughs that are only six months away are still only six months away
twenty years from now? It is not exactly unknown in the renewable energy field.
This book will not argue against any of the “Gosh! Wow!” stuff; more serious
R&D would probably produce exactly what many predict. But it seems urgent,
absolutely essential to show that we can phase out most fossil fuels at an
equal or lower cost than continuing to use them – even if there is no hydrogen
path, no cheap solar cells, and no inexpensive carbon fiber.

Once that is done, the book
will deal with R&D agendas - near term, long term and blue sky, but in the
form of a sample research program, rather than a core requirement of the
transition to a carbon neutral future.

To begin with, we need to
explain how we can we make the switch at the same or lower prices than we pay
now. Mostly, renewable energy costs more (at market prices) than fossil fuels.

No one uses kilowatts of
electricity, or BTUs of heat, or gallons of gasoline for their own sake; energy
provides service--comfort, cooked food, hot water and so on. If we can invest a
tiny amount of money to drastically reduce energy needed to get the same
results, more expensive renewable power can supply that reduced consumption at
total cost comparable to what we spend now--including capital costs for
increased efficiency. For example: we can inexpensively insulate a house so
that it needs only a small portion of the heating and cooling energy of the
average US home. Buy high-priced solar thermal panels to supply most of that remaining
climate control demand, and we still have an overall heating/cooling bill less
than before (including the cost of insulation). The bulk of the book will
specify how to institute this type of efficiency in all areas - buildings,
transportation and industry. We can reduce our energy consumption to a fraction
of what we consume now, without reducing our standard of living, and then
supply that fraction with small amounts of expensive renewable energy. Thus,
renewable energy can supply all the services fossil fuel provides now – warm
toes, cold beer, fast transportation--at a comparable cost. We will be dividing
the money differently – more for capital expenditures, less for fuel and
operating costs – but spend the same or a bit less than at present.

Through increased efficiency
we can phase out a high percentage of fossil fuel use essentially for free.
Again, energy is almost never consumed for its own sake. We use power to
accomplish goals. If your new car can get you where you want to go as quickly,
safely, and pleasurably as your old one, you don’t mind that it runs of a
battery charged by wind, generated in the U.S. rather than overseas.

(If we did not care about
global warming, air pollution, and human health, this would not be our lowest
priced alternative. Excluding such effects, it would be cheapest to install the
least expensive of the efficiency and renewable measures, and use fossil fuels
to supply most remaining needs. But we care how long we live, and how much of
our lives we spend healthy rather than sick. Most of us would prefer to switch
to renewable power at the same total price as we pay now for fossil fuels,
rather than lower our energy bill and continue to use oil, coal and natural
gas.)

The first chapter will document that almost our entire energy consuming
infrastructure has a lifespan of thirty years or fewer. This is important to
improving energy efficiency at low cost. If you have to replace a perfectly
good (but inefficient) car with a new high mileage model, then the cost of that
fuel saving is the entire cost of the car. But if you wait until you have a buy
a new car in any case, then the prices of saving gas is only the difference
between the cost of more and less efficient models. We will document that cost
can be very low indeed.

The next two chapters will show that industrial infrastructure may be
upgraded over the course of thirty years to use about 75% less energy per unit
of output--at very little additional cost. They will cover Material Intensity, indirect
savings through producing less intensive types of material goods. For example
they will document construction methods that reduce consumption of metal,
cement, lumber, plastic and other building materials; these save the energy
needed to make metal, cement, lumber and plastic before one factory is made
more efficient. Once this is covered for a variety of areas, direct savings
through making factories more efficient are documented.

Similar savings will be documented in transportation, and on residential
and commercial buildings.

A total savings chapter will total these percentage reductions,
incorporating population growth projections and dealing with questions of per
person economic growth as well. That will allow the projection of likely
consumption in 2040 if efficiency measures are adapted – and calculate major additional
savings in converting primary energy to useful power.

Right now a great deal of primary energy is used to produce an especially
important form of secondary energy – electricity. Nearly three units of fossil
fuel are burned for each unit of electricity delivered from fossil fuel plants.
Total efficiency measures documented will provide a large enough absolute
savings to allow all electricity to be produced via non-combustion sources –
wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal, solar thermal and so forth. Thus, not
having to burn fuel (either fossil or from renewable sources) to produce
electricity will provide a significant additional savings.

The chapters on sources will provide much less detail than the efficiency
sections – because the glamour of various renewable sources receives a great
deal of publicity in any case. Instead they will focus on costs of large scale
implementation, total resources available at that cost, and environmental
consequences of deployment.

Chapters on electricity will deal with existing hydroelectricity,
geothermal electricity, wind electricity, and solar thermal electricity. They
will also cover storage for wind and solar thermal electricity. While some of
these sources are comparable in price to that generated by fossil fuels, the
total dollar figures including storage and expansion of the electric grid to
make renewable electricity full available and fully dispatchable (there when
you want it) will be significantly higher than the market price of fossil
fuel generated electricity. This is why the main chapters dealt with
efficiency; smaller amounts of more expensive electricity will provide the same
services thanks to greater efficiency in using that electricity; total costs
won’t go up.

One area we will spend some time on is biomass (plant matter grown and
harvested for fuel use). We won’t drill down much into forms (biodiesel,
ethanol and so forth); instead we will concentrate on how to sustainably grow
enough biomass to convert. Producing usable fuel from biomass is not the
primary challenge; sustainably growing enough biomass to run even greatly
reduced demand by transport, industry and climate control without compromising
food or fiber production is the more difficult challenge.

The final chapter hints at
the economic, political, social and institutional barriers to implementing
these solutions, and tentatively explores the politics of overcoming these
barriers.

From here forward, this book
will be fairly number-heavy. In Hollywood, when a plot starts dragging, writers
often add a powerful visual image, to hang on to audience attention. At any
time in the discussion, please feel free to mentally insert a butterfly-laden
sunrise, a chase scene, or two girls kissing.

The leading
journalist covering this is Ross Gelbspan. In 1995, he was briefly fooled by
dishonest work from “global warming skeptics” Pat Michaels, S. Fred Singer and
Richard Lindzen; when a look at the actual science showed him he had been lied
to, he was angry enough to write the book “The Heat is On” to expose both their
junk science, and the cranks and liars behind it He has probably been the
leading journalist exposing the carbon lobby since then, and has essentially
given up the rest of his career to focus fulltime on the global warming and the
carbon lobby.

Ross Gelbspan,
The Heat Is on: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription (New
York: Perseus Book Group,1997). (Still an excellent source for history of the
Carbon Lobby.)

Ross Gelbspan,
Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and
Activists Have Fueled the Climate Crisis - and What We Can Do to Avert
Disaster (New York: Perseus Book Group - Basic Books, 2004). (Focuses more
on his view of solution – but also brings Carbon Lobby history up to date.)

Ross Gelbspan,
"Snowed,". Mother Jones May/Jun 2005, The Foundation for
National Progress, 10/Jun/2005
<http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/snowed.html>. (Part of
excellent May 2005 issue of Mother Jones, which contains a good survey of the
current state of the Carbon Lobby.)

Another
good source for current state of the Carbon Lobby is the Union of Concerned
Scientists.

To find out
more about individual organizations, I recommend SourceWatch published online
by The Center For Media and Democracy. You will that along with groups devoted
primarily to global warming denial, much Carbon Lobby funding goes to general
right wing groups that include it as one activity among many.

Center for
Media and Democracy, SourceWatch - SourceWatch. SourceWatch Applies It's
Standards to Itself - Reveals Own Funding Just as It Does Others, 2005, Center
for Media and Democracy, 10/Jun/2005
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch>.

[2] Just about every
public opinion survey by respectable sources shows about 75% of the public
convinced that global warming is a real and serious problem, and about 25%
convinced of the opposite or uncertain.

The Gallup
poll for March 2005 shows nearly 80% of the population now believes human
caused global warming is real.

A series of public opinion polls regarding global warming
compiled by the highly regarded Program on International Policy Attitudes:

"The Reality and Urgency of
Global Warming," Americans & the World, Program on
International Policy Attitudes - Jointly Established by the Center on Policy
Attitudes (COPA) and the Center for International and Security Studies at
Maryland (CISSM), School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, 20/03 2005,
01/01/2005 <http://www.americans-world.org/digest/global_issues/global_warming/gw1.cfm>.

These
include the following:

In
September 2002, 74% said they "believe the theory that increased carbon
dioxide and other gases released into the atmosphere will, if unchecked, lead
to global warming and an increase in average temperatures" “Majorities
Continue to Believe in Global Warming and Support Kyoto Treaty”, The Harris
Poll, Harris Interactive #56 , October-23-2002 <http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=335>
((January 2, 2005)

--In
March 2001, 64% said they "believe that emissions of gases like carbon
dioxide are causing global temperature increases"; 23% did not (Time/CNN).

--In
an August 2000 Harris poll, 72% said they "believe[d] the theory" of
global warming, while 20% said they did not--up from December 1997 when in
response to the same question 67% said they believed it and 21% said they did
not.

--In
a July 1999 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 11% took the position that
"concern about global climate change is unwarranted."

--In
a September 1998 Wirthlin poll, 74% embraced the belief that "global
warming is real" even when the belief was defined in terms of global
warming having "catastrophic consequences," while just 22% said they
did not believe in it.

--An
October 1997 Ohio State University survey asked about "the idea that the
world's temperature may have been going up slowly over the last 100 years"
and found that 77% thought "this has probably been happening," while
20% thought "it probably hasn't been happening." Likewise, 74%
thought the world's average temperature would go up in the future, while 22%
thought it would not.

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press, Americans
Support Action on Global Warming: Progress Seen On AIDS, Jobs, Crime and the
Deficit. 21/11 1997, 02/07/2005
<http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=100>.